Signs of Trouble

While we as software developers prepare for production releases as much
as possible, the right sequence of events can still translate into
something very wrong. This past week, visitors to this blog were greeted
with the standard WordPress database error connection message, and I
was unaware until I decided to share this site with a contact.

Tracking Canvas State Using Objects

Despite being a fairly simple animation to watch, the instructions for
a fading grid of colors is actually very complex. By creating objects
to track the state of the animation a lot of duplicate code can be
avoided, and the concepts exposed by gridfader.js can be encapsulated
for easier canvas manipulation.

The landscape of web development is extremely volatile, changing not only from
year to year, but sometimes even day to day. The existence of tools such as
http://caniuse.com/
should be enough to prove that.

When I first started using Android, I would use file managers supporting various
network protocols to download files from my PC over WiFi. While this was worked,
it was still a constantly manual process of copying, deleting, or updating
files.

For a long time I tried to locate applications that would allow a more automated
approach, but the Android Market (eventually becoming the Play Store) had not
yet matured to catch up with advanced demands.

Sublime Text 2 has become one of my favorite text editors, despite being only
beta release software. The interface is very attractive and polished,
configuration is very flexible through the use of various JSON files, and it is
cross-platform so that my text editing environment is largely identical no
matter which platform I am on.